Do you really need special laundry detergent for baby’s clothes?

If you have a new baby or kids around, for sure you have mountains of laundry by the end of each week! Doing the laundry is a daunting task sometimes and having special detergents for some selected clothes (baby’s) can add to the steps of doing your laundry. Do we really need special detergents?

To be honest, you don’t need to buy special laundry detergent for your baby’s clothes if his / her skin is not too sensitive or is not allergic to regular detergent you regularly use. Just test it out first with one or two of your baby’s clothes and then observe if his/ her skin will react to it.

In the olden days

In the olden days (which was not so long ago, perhaps in the 80s and 90s), there only all-natural or organic detergents at the most but there were no baby-friendly detergents or laundry bars existing just yet. But we’re all okay today and we all turned out fine. Maybe some had rashes or were allergic but just got used to the detergent due to their exposure.

Most of the dirty clothes before were even washed by hand. Some of our old grandmas mentioned that they use the mild soaps for baby’s clothes like ivory, perla, etc.

Our Experience

Just to be sure, even before I gave birth, we bought a special baby detergent already and used it in the first couple of weeks with our eldest’s clothes. Then we decided to check and try our regular laundry detregent’s reaction to our baby’s skin and unfortunately, she had more rashes. Our kids both have an eczema so their skins are always unpredictable when it comes to the appearance of rashes. So we decided to continue using special detergent for their clothes.

Our 2 -year old has been using regular detergent now and she no longer reacts negatively to the regular detergent we are using. It’s our almost one-year old baby boy’s clothes that are still being washed using the mild detergents.

For practical reasons, I wanted to just use regular detergent for our kids but their skin don’t seem to permit it. It’s okay as long as you know the children are okay and free from irritation.

Our top picks

Sharing what we use for our kids’ clothes. We love how mild and good these are and are available in a lot of supermarkets and shopping malls nationwide.

Check Smart Steps‘s site here for more info on their products and we shared before how good their products are too here.

You may check Cycles‘s site here for details and where you can get them.

These products are so helpful especially now that a lot of children are allergic to strong ingredients. Newborn babies are so delicate that you need to introduce them to the chemicals and pollution in our world slowly and gently. Thank goodness these products are now available in the market. It makes every parent’s life easier today. Thankful for innovations like these.

There are some other organic detergents available but we chose the ones above since it’s relatively more affordable than others and are available in a lot of places we go to so it’s easy to get them.

Again, it’s not required that we use baby detergent for kids but it will help introduce them to the new elements in this world slowly and safely. There are so many products these days that assist us to make parenthood fun and exciting. Let’s try them and explore.